You Might Not Want Async

First version given at PyCon TW 2016.
Revised for PyCon APAC 2016 (Seoul).
Revised for PyCon JP 2016.

Asynchrony in Python had gathered much momentum recently, with interests from core developers, as evidenced by the introduction of `asyncio` in Python 3.4, and a great boom of related third-party projects following it. By utilising more functionalities from the underlying operating system, it is a great solution to many existing problems in Python applications, gaining practical concurrency without working around the well-known GIL (global interpreter lock) problem.

With all its advantages, asynchrony is, however, still a relatively new concept in Python, and as a result could be somewhat mistaken, even misunderstood by some people. One of these misconceptions, probably the most serious, is to mistake concurrency through asynchrony for parallelism. Although `asyncio` (and other similar solutions) lets multiple parts of your program executes without interfering each other, it does *not* allow them to run together—this is still impossible, at least in CPython, due to the continued existence of the GIL. This makes asynchrony suitable for only a certain, instead of all, kinds of problems. Evaluation is therefore required before a programmer can decide whether the asynchrony model is suitable for a particular application.

Furthermore, partly due to its relatively short existence, paradigms in asynchrony programming do not necessarily fit well with other parts of Python, including libraries, either built-in or third-party ones. Since only blocking libraries were available in most of Python’s history, many assumptions they made may not work well with async programs out-of-the-box. Adopting asynchrony, at least at the present time, will therefore introduce more technical debt to your program. These are all important aspects that require much consideration before you dive head-first into asynchrony.